1. The days are getting hotter and more oppressive again, with regular days of triple-digit temperatures as the desert sun leans more weight on its domain.

2. This coming week will be my last at this school. It is a very melancholy experience, since it means saying good-bye to the students, and I’m a little anxious about how and whether I’ll be able to find another job, and if so what it will look like.

3. The final piece I had my sophomores read was Tolkien’s Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics (they had just finished Beowulf). Among it’s many nuggets of wisdom is this beautiful summation of the heroic narrative:

Whereon, as in a little circle of light about their halls, men with courage as their stay went forward to that battle with the hostile world and the offspring of the dark which ends for all, even the kings and champions, in defeat.

4. David Stewart talks about the ‘Brown M&Ms Test.’ The story is that the band Van Halen had an elaborate contract for any venue that wanted to host them, which had to be followed to the letter. One notorious item was that a bowl of m&ms would be provided for the band from which all brown m&ms were removed. This sounds absurd, but there was a method behind the madness. Van Halen was a very effects-heavy band, and most venues weren’t actually equipped to handle them. A bowl of filthy, disgusting brown m&ms would mean that the venue hadn’t actually read the contract closely or taken its instructions seriously.

The ‘Brown M&Ms Test,’ therefore, is a relatively minor, but visible indicator of someone’s attitude towards a project. Deliberately miscasting a character, for instance, indicates that the integrity of the story is not a high priority.

5. I checked out some of the UFO files that were recently released. They’re basically all just dots. Could be interference, or could be a hundred other explanations. To the extent they show anything real, my suspicion is they’re some sort of supernatural entities: fairies or angelic beings or something.

It may raise some eyebrows that I think fairies more likely than aliens, but I think it’s pretty straightforward: if it were aliens, that would imply creatures traveled thousands of lightyears with unimaginable technology only to evasively zip around over the last populated places they could find. It would be as if Columbus showed up the Caribbean and spent all his time trying to avoid being seen. The behavior, such as it is (and assuming it’s anything other than static or anomalies) seems to me to match something local, but supernatural.

6. I like to think (and half suspect) that the reason the government doesn’t release the JFK files is that it actually was just Oswald acting alone and no one will believe them.

7. It’s late and I don’t have anything else to say right now.